21
" Do you have any idea why you might be feeling better?”
“No, not really,” I said curtly. Better wasn’t even the word for how I felt. There wasn’t a word for it. It was more that things too small to mention—laughter in the hall at school, a live gecko scurrying in a tank in the science lab—made me feel happy one moment and the next like crying. Sometimes, in the evenings, a damp, gritty wind blew in the windows from Park Avenue, just as the rush hour traffic was thinning and the city was emptying for the night; it was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live. For weeks, I’d been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I’d been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold. "
― Donna Tartt , The Goldfinch
22
" I’d like to share with you a parable: the parable of Bob the Angel.
A girl was walking down a darkly lit city street late at night. A man jumped out from the shadows and attacked her, suddenly she was suffocating and disoriented as hands clasped around her neck and the force of his attack started to push her down. She tried to yell as she struggled to pull his arms from her neck while she crumpled backwards to the ground, “God . . . help me!”
The next thing she remembers—just as the fear consumed her, and right as she disappeared into the misery and despair of helplessness—was a loud crash and an explosion of glass which rained down upon her and her attacker. The assailant’s lifeless body was suspended above her, held from collapsing on her by an unknown force, and then pulled away from hovering over her and dropped onto the pavement beside her.
She opened her eyes in the faint shadowy light, to see black matted hair and a long, black beard framing the eyes of a man. The smell of alcohol on his breath would have knocked her out if the adrenaline was not still trilling through her veins.
There he stood, God’s angel, off-kilter and drunk, with a broken whiskey bottle in his hand.
“You probably shouldn’t be walking through here this late at night,” was all he said as he turned away.
“Wait! What’s your name?” she asked, still stunned half sitting up on the ground.
All she heard as he walked away was his trailing voice calling, “Bob’s as good as any. . . .”
An angel is a messenger, and sometimes we only want letters sent in white envelopes with beautiful gold print, when sometimes a simple “no” on the back of a gum wrapper is what we are offered.
Every postcard from heaven does not come with a picture of the sunset there, nor should it. If it is an answer we want, an answer we will get. As far as pretty postcards, there are many others willing to send us that.
If not harps and gold-tipped wings, what then is the mark of an angel? An answer which pierces your soul, and which inspires a question that invites you to look outside of yourself and up to God.
God is very objective; He wants to make us think, to engage the faculties we have been given, and to learn from the messengers he sends us. He wants us in the ark before the flood; he could come himself—or send a Noah—but most of the time he sends Bob.
Bob is in you, Bob is in me, Bob is in the emotionalized, sarcastic, mocking, patronizing, proud or foolish person which points out meaningful things to us in the worst possible moments, or in the worst possible way. "
― Michael Brent Jones , Dinner Party: Part 2
24
" My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.
These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, theywere everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning.
These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art, are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging, eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world; commit all manner of crimes, perhaps; follow the wildest chimeras, go down in the end in agony, but leave behind a record of new heights scaled and new rewards won for all mankind; the vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of survival starts again.
The human soul enjoys these rare, classic periods, but, apart from them, we are seldom single or unique; we keep company in this world with a hoard of abstractions and reflections and counterfeits of ourselves -- the sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast, the machine and the sleep-walker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image, indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye. We get borne along, out of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind unnoticed, or to dodge down a side street, pause, breathe freely and take our bearings, or to push ahead, out-distance our shadows, lead them a dance, so that when at length they catch up with us, they look at one another askance, knowing we have a secret we shall never share. "
― Evelyn Waugh , Brideshead Revisited
33
" The Last LeafI saw him once before,As he passed by the door,And againThe pavement stones resound,As he totters o'er the groundWith his cane.They say that in his prime,Ere the pruning-knife of TimeCut him down,Not a better man was foundBy the Crier on his roundThrough the town.But now he walks the streets,And looks at all he meetsSad and wan,And he shakes his feeble head,That it seems as if he said," They are gone." The mossy marbles restOn the lips that he has prestIn their bloom,And the names he loved to hearHave been carved for many a yearOn the tomb.My grandmamma has saidPoor old lady, she is deadLong agoThat he had a Roman nose,And his cheek was like a roseIn the snow;But now his nose is thin,And it rests upon his chinLike a staff,And a crook is in his back,And a melancholy crackIn his laugh.I know it is a sinFor me to sit and grinAt him here;But the old three-cornered hat,And the breeches, and all that,Are so queer!And if I should live to beThe last leaf upon the treeIn the spring,Let them smile, as I do now,At the old forsaken boughWhere I cling. "
34
" I’d like to share with you a parable: the parable of Bob the Angel.
A girl was walking down a darkly lit city street late at night. A man jumped out from the shadows and attacked her, suddenly she was suffocating and disoriented as hands clasped around her neck and the force of his attack started to push her down. She tried to yell as she struggled to pull his arms from her neck while she crumpled backwards to the ground, “God . . . help me!”
The next thing she remembers—just as the fear consumed her, and right as she disappeared into the misery and despair of helplessness—was a loud crash and an explosion of glass which rained down upon her and her attacker. The assailant’s lifeless body was suspended above her, held from collapsing on her by an unknown force, and then pulled away from hovering over her and dropped onto the pavement beside her.
She opened her eyes in the faint shadowy light, to see black matted hair and a long, black beard framing the eyes of a man. The smell of alcohol on his breath would have knocked her out if the adrenaline was not still trilling through her veins.
There he stood, God’s angel, off-kilter and drunk, with a broken whiskey bottle in his hand.
“You probably shouldn’t be walking through here this late at night,” was all he said as he turned away.
“Wait! What’s your name?” she asked, still stunned half sitting up on the ground.
All she heard as he walked away was his trailing voice calling, “Bob’s as good as any. . . .”
An angel is a messenger, and sometimes we only want letters sent in white envelopes with beautiful gold print, when sometimes a simple “no” on the back of a gum wrapper is what we are offered.
Every postcard from heaven does not come with a picture of the sunset there, nor should it. If it is an answer we want, an answer we will get. As far as pretty postcards, there are many others willing to send us that.
If not harps and gold-tipped wings, what then is the mark of an angel? An answer which pierces your soul, and which inspires a question that invites you to look outside of yourself and up to God. "
― Michael Brent Jones , Dinner Party: Part 2
37
" But the artist began to have misgivings as the wall underwent its transformation. Bigger than any pavement project he had yet undertaken, it made him restless. Over the years, a precise cycle had entered the rhythm of his life, the cycle of arrival, creation, and obliteration. Like sleeping, waking and stretching, or eating, digesting and excreting, the cycle sang in harmony with the blood in his veins and the breath in his lungs. He learned to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure, for they were the progenitors of complacent routine, to be shunned at all costs. The journey -- chanced, unplanned, solitary -- was the thing to relish.
Now, however, his old way of life was being threatened. The agreeable neighborhood and the solidity of the long, black wall were reawakening in him the usual sources of human sorrow: a yearning for permanence, for roots, for something he could call his own.... "
― Rohinton Mistry , Such a Long Journey
